Rising methane: is warming feeding warming?

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Ed Dlugokencky is a researcher at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Global Monitoring Laboratory. Ed has been responsible for NOAA's measurements of atmospheric methane, and their interpretation, since 1990. Currently, he is the scientific leader of NOAA's Cooperative Global Air Sampling Network, a network of about 60 globally distributed sites where weekly air samples are collected then analyzed for a suite of long-lived greenhouse gases and related species in Boulder, Colorado, USA. His research is focused on using NOAA's high-quality atmospheric observations to constrain the global budgets of atmospheric methane and other species that influence climate.

Steve has worked as a research chemist at NOAA since the early 1990s. He leads an ongoing global-scale program making atmospheric measurements of over 30 chemicals that affect stratospheric ozone, climate, and air quality. Even after 30 years of making these measurements, he still enjoys uncovering new insights into the workings of the global atmosphere those data provide, and using his results to inform policymakers on the international stage about the effectiveness of global environmental agreements, such as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

Sander Houweling is professor in 'atmosphere, climate and greenhouse gases' at the Departement of Earth Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and is also affiliated to SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. His main field of research is in the use of atmospheric measurements to study the global cycles of long lived greenhouse gases, with a specific focus on methane and carbon dioxide. His group develops atmospheric inverse modelling methods to quantify the sources and sinks of these gases at scales ranging from local (e.g. individual industrial facilities) to global (e.g. atmospheric growth rates), by combining ground based and satellite measurements. He is involved in the development of the Copernicus anthropogenic CO2 emissions Monitoring and Verification Support capacity, and the use of currently operational satellite instrumentation (e.g. S5p-TROPOMI) in preparation for that goal.

Dr Ganesan is a Senior Lecturer and NERC Independent Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on understanding what influences the composition of the atmosphere and she mainly focus on greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances. Anita is interested in finding new ways to understand how sources and sinks of these trace gases vary from different systems and regions. One of her main interests is in understanding why methane concentrations in the atmosphere exhibit large year-to-year changes. She combines high-resolution regional models with data from surface, aircraft and satellite platforms, and information from isotopologues and other tracers to derive an understanding of the methane budget.

Dr Thompson is a Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research since 2011. Her research is focused on improving the quantification of greenhouse gas emissions and understanding the drivers of variations in these. For this, she uses atmospheric observations and modelling, as well as statistical optimization. Dr Thompson completed her PhD in 2005 at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Since then she has held post-doctoral research positions at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena and the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement in Saclay. Dr Thompson is an author on the IPCC AR5 and AR6 and co-leads the Nitrous Oxide Budget activity of the Global Carbon Project.

Professor Vincent Gauci is a Birmingham Professorial Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR). He is interested in the biogeochemistry of carbondense terrestrial ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, peatlands. In particular he is interested in how these ecosystems interact with the atmosphere through the exchange of trace greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. He is also interested in fluvial losses of carbon from these ecosystems and agroecosystems and, as with his interest in GHG exchange, a unifying theme is the response of these exchanges to various agents of global change including atmospheric CO₂ concentration change, pollutant exposure and deposition and land use change.

Dr Carole Helfter is an environmental physicist with over twelve years’ experience of studying greenhouse gases in natural and urban environments. She has led measurement campaigns in temperate and tropical ecosystems and has developed bespoke data capture and interpretation solutions for unconventional endeavours such as heavy metal flux measurements in central Delhi, India, and country-scale greenhouse gas budgets for the British Isles using shipborne measurements. Dr Helfter’s work is centred on carbon dioxide and methane emissions from terrestrial and aquatic sources with a special interest in the effects of disturbances (man-made and climate anomalies) on emissions. Current research activities include quantification of methane emissions from heavily polluted urban lakes in India, study of the drivers and processes underpinning the short- and medium-term variations of the carbon dioxide sink strength of a Scottish peatland, and derivation of the methane and carbon dioxide budgets of the seasonal and permanent wetlands of the Okavango Delta, Botswana.

Pete Smith is the Royal Society Wolfson Professor of Soils and Global Change at the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, School of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK). Since 1996, he has served as Convening Lead Author, Lead Author and Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, as the Convening Lead Author of the Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Mitigation chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and for the Agriculture and Forestry chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group III). He has coordinated and participated in many national and international projects on soils, agriculture, greenhouse gases, climate change, mitigation and impacts, and ecosystem modelling. He is a Fellow of the Society of Biology, a Rothamsted Research Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society (London), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

Andy is Deputy Director (International) of the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, where he focuses on international research and capability building to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Andy is also vice-chair of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which focuses on options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Previously he served as coordinating lead author for two major IPCC reports released in 2014 and managed production of another report in 2007. Andy also served as Inquiry Director in the Secretariat of the Interim Climate Change Committee, which was set up by the New Zealand Government to develop evidence and analysis for addressing New Zealand’s livestock emissions consistent with the Zero Carbon Act. Andy’s research interests include the role of agriculture in climate change policy with a particular focus on methane and climate metrics, as well as climate change impacts, adaptation, uncertainty and implications for decision-making.

Rob Jackson and his lab examine the many ways people affect the Earth. They seek basic scientific knowledge and use it to help shape policies and reduce the environmental footprint of global warming, energy extraction, and many other issues. They're currently examining the effects of climate change and droughts on forest mortality and grassland ecosystems. They are also working to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Global Carbon Project (globalcarbonproject.org), which Jackson chairs; examples of new research Rob is leading include establishing a global network of methane tower measurements at more than 80 sites worldwide and measuring and reducing methane emissions from oil and gas wells, city streets, and homes and buildings.

Professor Martin Manning has worked across many areas of science including: theoretical physics, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change science broadly. From 2002 to 2007, Martin was Director of the Working Group I Technical Support Unit for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which produced the Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change for governments and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has been author of more than a hundred peer reviewed papers and reports as well as more than twenty chapters in books on climate change, four of which were major IPCC reports to governments. As the inaugural Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, he led the most comprehensive interdisciplinary study carried out so far on New Zealand’s capacity to adapt to climate change.